Why are brick and mortar HiFi dealers so bad?

I am near Winston-Salem, NC.  Ember Audio has just reopened and Chris is super knowledgeable and easy to deal with.  No pressure sales.  I was recently looking for an integrated.  He setup a shootout and the Naim Supernait 3 sounded best to my ears.  He let me take it home for a week on a handshake.  It was a little more than I wanted to spend and his Naim rep found me an unused Supernait 2 for a good price and I purchased that and a Bluesound Node 2i at a great price. 

Definitely worth the drive around the Triad area and maybe from Asheville if you are looking for something specific.

I live in a small state with no dealers and as such I have always had to buy my gear outside the state. I have a fairly high end system consisting of Rockport speakers, VTL amps, ARC pre and phono pre amp, VPI/Graham TT.  Over the years I have visited high end shops in NYC, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, LA, San Francisco to audition and buy new pieces.  Generally I got the snob approach and condescending attitude. However a few years ago I was in Omaha NE and visited The Sound Environment, a really high end shop.  At the time they were the dealer for the TechDas $90,000 Air Force 1 turntable.  I asked the salesperson, Todd, if I could hear it and also told him I simply could not afford it.  He was gracious and gave me a tour of the different rooms and to listen to various systems. Then he took me to their reference system room with the Air Force table. All in the system was over $500,000.  He asked me what I wanted to hear and for the next 90 minutes we had a great time listening to music. I even met the owner who is very friendly.  He invited me to come back whenever I was back in town.  I have steered my few audiophile friends to Sound Environment and would suggest others to visit them in Omaha or Kansas City. Or simply call them. And I have purchased from them

If NY has more audio stores per capital, which I doubt,  of if not, there must be good ones. 

If you go into an audio "salon" ready to complain about "outrageous prices" and suspicious of being "ripped off", they're not going to show you a lot of love. I used to actually buy equipment I liked from a store once I had enough money to make it happen, while my brother used to go into the same store to argue over what they had and how much they could lower the price to what he wanted. I drank the Kool-Aid- it's true. But I got to audition a lot of gear over the years so I could make educated choices. Another friend I had told me I was crazy to buy "wires that looked like garden hoses", but HIS system just played music which sounded "clean enough", but also utterly lifeless. I was diplomatic about his remarks but went on doing what made ME happy. The store wants to see if you will buy something they have- otherwise you can look around all you want as long as you don't take up their time with demo's and asking a lot of off-topic questions. They can be pretty snobby- it's true.
That is until you show that you're motivated. And the service after the sale is usually pretty good.